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That’s quite a title, isn’t it, but both alliterative adjectives matter. If you like doublechecking me, try one or the other with ‘federalism’ in your search. I joined them together because they actually work together and I hate synonyms designed to throw us off the real story, its depth, or its trail over decades. This will also remind us why the “state-led” description of the Common Core, as in not a federal initiative, is a Red Herring literally designed to throw off the scent so we look in the wrong places. Both WIOA and the ESEA Rewrite are grounded in both kinds of federalism and its No Child Left Behind predecessor is cited as the ultimate example of polyphonic federalism in this paper “Toward a Theory of Interactive Federalism” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=734644 by the now Dean of Emory Law School. Notice that the 2006 date is the year after the famous (infamous?) Yale conference put on by the American Constitution Society proposing a new Constitution by 2020 that was followed up with a book in 2009.

Another one of those things that has not been on our radars, but needs to be, because it describes what is actually happening to all of us. Let’s go back in time to the mid-80s when (as my book lays out) so much is already shifting towards intentional social transformation via education. Recognizing that the goals of the ESEA Rewrite could only be met via James Comer’s (also at Yale) views of a social interaction, psychological focus of student achievement, I discovered he had written the Foreword for a 1985 book Choosing Equality: The Case for Democratic Schooling that sought to “qualitatively change the environmental context–the school culture–that conditions the learning process.” That certainly explains why every federal regulatory power since President Obama took office has been directed to achieving a Positive School Climate with a variety of rationales.

The vision of democratic schooling, then and now in the Common Core implementation and the ESEA Rewrite language, insists that “If education were structured around the social needs of children, families, communities, and a democratic society [in the Marxian, John Dewey, participatory sense laid out in the book], the priority would be to endow all children with the basic and higher-order skills [Remember the tethering from the last post] needed to fulfill personal and citizenship roles. The mission of schools would be individual and social empowerment, which itself would promote more equitable chances of survival in the labor market.” Schools, in other words, will increase student achievement for all students by focusing now on enhancing “all children’s capacities to think critically and to acquire social knowledge.”

That was from the “Building a New Agenda” ending, but before that was the “Governance and Funding: Toward Progressive Federalism” chapter. If the basic and social ‘needs’ of all people are to be met, either in the US or anywhere in the world, “new structural mechanisms that allow popular control over resources and priorities” are needed. The book proposed the remedy as the “concept of progressive federalism, expanding the social and fiscal responsibilities of government at all levels–federal, state, and local–and defining the role of each more appropriately to its function.” We can be sure that the UN’s Global CIFAL Network I wrote about on January 6 was created from an awareness of progressive federalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/us/politics/30federal.html says that President Obama’s Open Data Initiative (see tag), which we know was such a priority that it was his first action on his first day in office, was actually grounded in progressive federalism.

Progressive federalism sees “government action as the central instrument for achieving egalitarian goals and more effective practice in public education.” The book, which described the practices and policies my book and this blog have tracked to what the actual planned implementation looks like everywhere, sought to “develop the role of local and state governance, as well, to promote more comprehensive responses to educational needs and to engage all levels of government in the struggle for progressive reform.” The book complained that progressives were not appreciating the powers over people and places held at the state and local levels. It reiterated that the “concept of progressive federalism includes the necessity of multiple levels of authority, particularly state and federal regulatory functions that safeguard standards and rights.”

Choosing Equality pointed out the reasons for what is now so clearly being foisted on us: “The federal government is the only feasible agency for the redistribution of wealth on a nationwide basis, both in its tax policies and in its priorities for public spending. The federal government is also the primary agent for promoting geographic as well as individual equity.” Equity as in whatever must be done to achieve equality of results for various previously disadvantaged groups. That’s still the impetus behind the global push surrounding Excellence and Equity for All as this recent paper shows.

http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/pdfs/w/innovation/quest/journals/QuestJournal_BenLevin-AvisGlaze.pdf made it quite clear that the required Equity is obtained in the manner described in the 1985 book although its lead author Ben Levin has now become too notorious to call as a Congressional or legislative witness. The co-author, Avis Glaze, wrote yesterday in an EdWeek post entitled “Achieving Excellence with Equity: A Mandate for All Schools” timed around the second day of ESEA Rewrite hearings. Student Learning tied to the tethering view of experiential education from the last post as well as the Rewrite’s Equity focus is a crucial point so many educators are lying to the public about all over the world.

This is from a 2008 UNESCO paper called “Inclusive Education–the Way of the Future.” It laid out the shifts in what is to constitute ‘learning’ to allow the push of equality in outcomes and success for all. It’s also embodied in what is “high-quality education” and Equity and what it takes to be a “high-achieving country” on the PISA assessments created by the OECD.

“So long as learning is understood as the acquisition of bodies of knowledge presented by the teacher, schools are likely to be locked into rigidly-organized curricula and teaching practices. Commonly, therefore, inclusive curricula are based on a view of learning as something that takes place when learners are actively involved in making sense of their experience. [hence the tethering metaphor in the last post] Learners, in other words, cannot simply be told. Rather, they have to discover and understand things for themselves.”

In whatever ways suit political power as governments at all levels coordinate around forcing people and places to accept. or even not notice, the progressive visions of a just society being pursued. As the book Remaking America recently concluded:

“States have the power, and often the will, to meet the needs of citizens in progressive ways…Progressive federalism seeks to harness this potential state contribution to our national democracy without retreating from civil rights and a national affirmative state…to update and give content to the metaphor as ‘laboratories for democracy’.”

Are those kinds of efforts then really ‘state-led’ It helps if we look at why Dean Schapiro chose the “Polyphonic Alternative” to describe the new conception of federalism being constructed. Both Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, and Cass Sunstein, the President’s first-term “Regulatory Czar” are involved with the American Constitution Society’s push here as is Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General. Well-connected to federal regulatory power would be an understatement of epic proportions apart from the Soros funding, polyphony has the element of coinciding authority, working in harmony, a “stew” instead of the “adjoining” layered authority symbolized by a “marble cake.” Federalism that “can combine into new melodies, without losing its individual character.”

States and localities in such a mellifluous stew of Statist coordination may still retain their ‘character’. Thus preventing easy recognition of the nature of this crucial shift. They are entirely losing their function though as a barrier to governmental power over the individual as laid out in the still existing US Constitution. The progressive label was at least a tip-off that a shift in the fundamental governing philosophy had occurred, apparently to avoid the cacophony of free enterprise and individual abilities and choices. Looking through that Interactive Federalism paper, I cannot find any protection from overbearing governments at all levels committed to trying to achieve Equality of Outcomes.

As the last several posts combined have pointed out, the “brain is a sculpture carved by experience” as the OECD Neuroscience research has pointed out, and governments at all levels are now committing to sculpting the human brains of students at a neurobiological level. They are pushing the practices and policies thought to advance a society and economy grounded literally in transferring “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Neither the UN or the OECD hides anymore their pursuit of what Marx called his Human Development Model of society. Neither do progressives, where ever they are. Historically, there has been a barrier–the language of the US Constitution, but not under these legal theories or conceptions of federalism.

Education, especially K-12, is the global vehicle, because as the OECD recognized with this quote from Wu Ting-Fang: “Education is like a double-edged sword. It may be turned to dangerous uses if it is not properly handled.”

Welcome to 2015 everyone and buckle up. The year end solicitations and reports since my last post truly had the effect of tying up all loose ends and missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of what is truly going on around us. The intention is for this to be a seminal year in transformations in the US and globally and anyone who has read my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon and reads this blog regularly will be in a position to immediately recognize what is happening to us. I honestly wish I was not correct about what is going on, but I am. Here we go again so we can all be ready to turn spotlights on what were intended to be stealth transformations at a local level that have been laid out clearly at the global level.

The United Nations has an Institute for Training and Research–UNITAR–that has existed for about 50 years. Knowing, I suppose, that UN cronycrats are simply not people we are likely to willingly and knowingly take marching orders from, UNITAR has (per Chadwick Alger) a Decentralized Cooperation Program (DCP) that “trains local actors in order to enhance their capacity to implement international conventions and the MDGs.” Let me interrupt Alger here, MDGS stands for Millennium Development Goals and those UN intentions for all of us expire in 2015 so this is the year that the UN and its apparatus must come up with their post-2015 plans for all of us. Having 12 CIFALs–Centres International de Formation des Autorites et Leaders–Training Centers for Local Authorities/Actors–training mayors, school supers, influential legislators involved with economic development, city council members, etc. to implement the UN’s agenda quietly using their powers of coercion, regulation, taxation, and control over K-12 and higher education is certainly the mother of all confessions in my mind.

Let’s see what Sally Fegan-Wyles said about CIFAL and its intentions to turn local actors into key change agents in its agenda in a 2014 brochure. http://www.unitar.org/dcp/sites/unitar.org.dcp/files/2014_cifal_brochure_compressed.pdf It fits in perfectly with what Alger said what UNITAR’s purpose in creating the stealth DCP program in the first place–”DCP is a hub for information, communication, and training between UN Agencies and local actors such as local authorities, public and private companies, civil society and academia.” That, of course, is the Turchenko vision from the USSR on how to quietly take over Western societies and economies for those of you who have read my book. It’s officially here, in operation, impacting all our lives, and basically invisible until this post.

UNITAR and the DCP vision know now that “local governments have a crucial role in addressing global challenges. It is the local authorities who are the most closely in touch with the needs of their communities. On issues as diverse as urban planning, roads and public transport, energy, climate change, water and sanitation, disaster risk reduction, local leaders are increasingly leading the march towards lasting solutions. Local governments are also essential partners of the international community in implementing global agreements and advancing sustainable development.” Now, if we read the rest of that cited brochure, the fact that the Orwellian phrase “sustainable development” is actually a euphemism for Uncle Karl’s public-sector controlled, little c, Human Development Society, is quite obvious as meeting the ‘needs’ of everyone and ‘inclusion’ becomes the focus of society and the economy in the 21st century.

We can see now why economic justice political theorists like Benjamin Barber have switched their approach to touting the gridlock in DC and wanting mayors and cities to be the new focus in government decision-making. It’s no wonder then that the Ed Leader 21 school districts have formed a Consortium to lobby Congress for a return to ‘local’ control of the school districts. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/deliberate-cultural-evolution-via-developmental-psychology-to-force-social-change-or-gypsy-supers-lobby-dc/ Remember our Curricular Redesign Global Change Agent Charles Fadel even coined the phrase ‘glocal’ to capture the real essence that what is being imposed locally and by what may technically be elected officials or appointees of elected politicians is actually global in the coordinated vision being put in place.

That’s where I want to pivot to explain how the CIFAL Global Network came on my radar over the holidays and how it ties indisputably into absolutely every aspect of K-12 education from classroom and school instructional practices to who can get and now keep their teaching license. It is also tied to the WIOA implementation with each US state’s plan due by July as well as politically directed economic development UNITAR is describing and the workforce development new purpose of high school we have been talking about. When I first encountered the Atlanta Regional Commission’s plans for economic development in the 10 county metro area and its binding of all local school districts to ‘innovative learning’ using technology, I came across the name “Pendleton Group” as in charge of the vision. Lots of elected officials, school district employees, Chamber of Commerce reps, lawyers representing school districts and cities all involved with this vision.

Two names of listed Pendleton partners stuck in my brain–Phil Jacobs and Craig Lesser. Phil Jacobs because he is now the Chair of the world’s largest education accreditor–AdvancED whose 2012 Quality Standards I described so alarmingly in my book. He is also on the Georgia Professional Standards Commission in charge of the new teacher licensing criteria. He also showed up as a listed name on a 2008 commission that in my opinion stripped Georgia elected school board members of their powers to object to what a district school super chooses to do concerning schools, curriculum, and instructional practices. When the various radical groups wanting me to give a year-end gift were bragging about their planned 2015 activities, I kept thinking about how much power WIOA had given them that would kick into gear this year.

So I decided to look into whether the Pendleton Group had mentioned WIOA recently. No, but its head, Craig Lesser, had listed his leadership of something called CIFAL Atlanta that I had never heard of. Well, I have now and so have each of you. One of the 12 UNITAR centers in the Global Network and headquartered in Atlanta. No wonder I have been feeling accidentally immersed in all this collectivist nonsense with a deadly past. https://web.kennesaw.edu/news/stories/kennesaw-state-officials-take-part-americas-competitiveness-forum says that CIFAL Atlanta is now headquartered at Kennesaw State and is a “public-private partnership between UNITAR and the City of Atlanta.” Lesser, by the way, used to be in charge of state economic development for the previous Governor. The one so deeply involved in creating and advocating for the Common Core.

But Lesser is not listed as the creator of CIFAL Atlanta. That honor goes to an Axel Leblois, whose cv http://siteresources.worldbank.org/TURKEYEXTN/Resources/361711-1328710573908/8427363-1329990588229/AxelLEBLOIS-en.pdf and all his ties to the UN system just happened to be on a World Bank site. LeBlois is also listed as behind another UN entity, backed by lots of tech companies, called G3ict, that is also headquartered in Atlanta. Must be the convenience of the airport and access to the King Center and the new Civil Rights Museum. G3ict is technically about advocacy for those with disabilities and a universal entitlement to ICT for All, but a document called The Accessibility Imperative makes it perfectly clear that the emphasis on those with Disabilities is about shifting all the “nations of the world to meet the challenge that history has put before us to become a society in which all members, including the most vulnerable, can integrate and make a significant contribution.”

That would be Uncle Karl’s “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” vision that is also the crucial component of the sustainable development vision above. The one that relied on capitalism producing a necessary level of technology that ICT–Interactive Communications Technology (computers and cable and satellite communication that allows instantaneous sound and visual communication) is viewed as fulfilling. Remember my “Peeking into the Behavioral Programming Blueprints” post from December 14 where I wrote about Marshall McLuhan? He had another book that came out after his death called The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century that described that that instantaneous sound and visual communication would create a different kind of mind than print. A Post-Literate, Right Brained Person who would be more amenable to propaganda and the pressures of the group.

That troubling 1989 book announced that “AT&T cooperating with the Bell Systems will be instrumental in producing the new man precisely because they are on the cutting edge of the future, due to the hybrid power being released by the merger of the digital computer and high-speed transmission equipment, will be reenforced by the fact that AT&T/Bell regionals will still be taken as an associative whole, one of the largest socioeconomic groups on the North American continent.” Phil Jacobs’ bio states he was an Exec with BellSouth before they were bought out by AT&T. CIFAL Atlanta has AT&T shown as its major sponsor. The book also points out AT&T is “hiring executives from its opposition, particularly IBM and Honeywell.”

I describe the role of IBM’s PTech initiative and its System of Systems global vision in my book, but the operating system of that IBM computer is what created the Microsoft fortune that funds all of the Gates funding of all these education initiatives tied to the Common Core. Axel LeBlois’ bio says he was President of Honeywell Information Systems. He also founded the Wireless Internet Institute. All the education initiatives the Gates Foundation is funding and all the education reforms being mandated by the education organizations Phil Jacobs is listed as being involved with have the effect of minimizing the Left-Hemisphere Man created by logic and phonetic print and heightening the “right-hemisphere man” that Marshall McLuhan wrote about and wanted so badly.

Fascinating, huh? And precisely how the Gramscian March Through the Institutions of the West was supposed to work. None of the people involved in all this public sector advocacy even has to know all the elements I have just laid out. They can have the best personal intentions for these shifts and reforms. These laid out pieces though work like gears and are engaging us all in a clear vision that may well not be familiar to any of those actually imposing all of this on us.

It is past time for everyone to know what the assembled gear plan looks like before it moves us over a fiscal, social, and economic cliff.

Mulling over the Transdisciplinary, Intrapsychological themes we have been looking at beginning with the October 28 “Opting Out” post, I decided to hit my bookshelves to find some guidance to put these declared initiatives for our children and all of our futures into context. In my book Credentialed to Destroy, I cited Harvard Historian Richard Pipes’ Survival is Not Enough to share insights from behind the Iron Curtain on why collectivists always target consciousness. Today I want to go back to a different point he made about the need to control language and communication. Remember please that communication is one of the 4Cs of 21st Century Learning and is now being used as a euphemism to insist that students need to negotiate and come to a ‘shared understanding.’ http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/experimenting-on-people-and-places-via-the-rockefeller-process-of-communication-for-social-change/ is just one example of the latter use.

“Just as the private initiative of ordinary people, with its ‘second economy’ [the Black Market], has broken the state’s hold on the production and distribution of goods, so the courage of its intellectuals has given Russia a ‘second reality.’ This restoration to language of its proper function as a means of communication instead of domination is an act of revolutionary significance. In the words of Alain Besancon:

The Communist regime was, in effect, inaugurated by the public (state’s) appropriation of the means not of production but of communication. Well before the factories and fields were seized, it had been the newspapers, the printing establishments, the media…Much more directly fatal than the restoration of the market is the restoration of the human word, the privatization of the organs of speech, individual ownership of the throat…The writer breaks the compact of lies on which the entire equilibrium of ideological power rests. He gives words their meaning. He redresses the ideological inversion of language. He restores reality in its capacity as the unique reality and vaporizes surreality.”

Professor Pipes follows that Besancon quote from 1980 with this recognition: “Once the spell has been broken, the regime may never again be able to reassert its control over human perceptions and means of communication, a control that in some respects constitutes the irreducible essence of Communist power.” I think the Transdisciplinary agenda UNESCO is pushing and the rest of the education agenda centered on constructivism in reading and math it and so many other global entities are pushing in a coordinated manner are simply another way to get back that control. “We’ve found another way!” could be the theme of that Cooperation Agreement with Microsoft that Bill Gates signed.

I want to go back to the 1998 book cited in the Appendix of that Agreement because that’s where the title quote came from. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity ‘s last chapter is on Education. This is the lead-in on its new purpose: “Education, in its deepest sense and at whatever age it takes place, concerns the opening of identities–exploring new ways of being that lie beyond our current state.” Now when governments, and their allies in foundations or accreditation, decree that the negotiation of Identity is the purpose of K-12 education and they intend to prescribe, guide, and then assess for what that Identity can be, we are back beyond the scope of domination and control that Pipes and Besancon wrote about.

When education is now required to be “a mutual developmental process between communities and individuals, one that goes beyond mere socialization. It is an investment of a community in its own future, not as a reproduction of the past through cultural transmission, but as the formation of new identities that can take it history of learning forward,” we actually are back to a little c vision of the future of the kind Uncle Karl wrote about. This time though it is far more surreptitious. It definitely has a better PR campaign and a more alluring set of names.

I have stated repeatedly that Common Core is not about the transmission of knowledge and subject content in the traditional sense, no matter how much certain people now hype their reviews of textbooks and other instructional materials. Why? Because under the Transdisciplinary vision of education that is coming (even to Texas), “delivery of codified knowledge takes place away from actual practice, with a focus on instructional structure and pedagogical authority that discourages negotiation.” Negotiation–remember that obligation to come to a shared understanding I mentioned above? How many times have you heard that under the Common Core learning must be relevant and involve real world applications? Here’s the next line: “As a form of educational design, the reification of knowledge is thus not itself a guarantee that relevant or applicable learning will take place.”

“Students with a literal relation to a subject matter [like a traditional Algebra textbook, Geometry proofs, or that famous Catherine the Great World History lecture] can reproduce reified knowledge [or not and accept that C-] without attempting to gain some ownership of its meaning [in the sense of how it can impact their daily lives]. An evaluation process will become more informative regarding the learning that has actually taken place to the extent that its structure does not parallel that of instruction too closely, but instead conforms to the structure of engagement in actual practice and the forms of competence inherent in it.”

Oooh, I know. I know. Let’s call those latter types of evaluations High Quality Assessments or formative assessments. Then we can tell relieved parents there will be no more high stakes testing, just embedded learning tasks. We can all be certain the parents will not be told that school is now to be a place for “experiments of identity that students can engage in while there.” Keep that in mind though next time you hear of an assignment that basically amounts to role-playing. I want to close with Six Transdisciplinary Primary School Curriculum Themes so that students, parents, and teachers can better recognize when they have actually embarked on a UNESCO/Microsoft approved transformational educational experience. http://inquiryblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/td-themes.png is the source.

Six Sided Figure Going Clockwise from the Top

Who we are: An exploration of the nature of the self; of our beliefs and values; of personal, physical, mental, social and spiritual health; of our families,

Where we are in space and time: An exploration of our orientation in space and time; of our personal histories; the discoveries, explorations and migrations of humankind.

How we express ourselves: An exploration of the way which we discover and express our nature, ideas, feelings, beliefs and values through language and the arts.

How we organise ourselves: An exploration of human systems and communities; the structure and function of organisations; societal decision making; economic activities and their impact.

How the world works: An exploration of the physical and material world; of natural and human-made phenomena; of the world of science and technology.

Sharing the planet: An exploration of rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people; access to equal opportunities, peace and conflict resolution.

Yes, I too would classify that last one as Social Justice at 10 o’clock. The ultimate tragedy is that if we are in fact looking at a future of ‘finite resources,’ the ultimate cause is this officially endorsed Mind Arson view of Education to create Transformative Change Agents. This push to circumscribe the human mind to lock in the kind of control over individuals and their likely behaviors that the Soviets could only dream of.

The late Julian Simon knew that “The essence of wealth is the capacity to control the forces of nature, and the extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge.” All over the world that open-ended source of future wealth is being extinguished via K-12 education precisely, and almost solely, to once again gain the kind of control over the sources of production and communication that the Soviets lost and the Chinese wish to preserve and now extend. Globally.

Using the help of politically connected friends and corporations. There’s nothing unprecedented about what is being sought. The Internet and digital learning are just new means of communication. Plus the research the behavioral scientists documented in the 20th century has them itching for some real-time research across the globe.

So instead of being glum this holiday season that what is being attempted is so ugly, let’s be thankful for All We Now Know and Our Increasing Recognition of How Very Much this all matters.

Julian Simon knew that “minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths.” Now, we do too. No more accepting the declared PR pitches at face value.

If our 21st Century Lives were just a televised game of Jeopardy, the title would be the answer that would be linked to the championship. The correct question would be: What are the real goals envisioned when Education Reformers, politicians, and Political Radicals use the misleading term ‘standards’ in K-12 education? When that transformative Global Partnership we met in the last post says in bold face type on page 8 that “the pursuit of deep learning goals enabled by new pedagogies and accelerated by technology” is a Moral Imperative that will “guide all of our work,” what goals are really intended? The first part of the title comes from a paper published in the 1999 ASCD Yearbook called “The Role of Standards in Educational Reform for the 21st Century.” We actually do not have to assume that there is a link since one of the co-authors, Peter Hill, is also listed as a participant in the new Global Partnership on page 2 as one of its educational consultants.

http://www.carmelcrevola.com/publications/The_role_of_standards.pdf is the paper that once again makes it clear that the word standards is now being used as an Orwellian synonym. Translating the Common Core State Standards accurately then by its real purpose would be Common Behavioral and Dispositional Goals for All American Students, No Exceptions. Put together by DC-based trade groups hoping to cash in from the attached new vision of a politically-planned economy and society. Perhaps staffers who got to go on one of those trade junkets to China and thought that vision would work better for them. Hill made it clear on page one that the role of standards is to foster “values such as equality, fraternity, and democracy” indicating he may have always wanted to participate in the Storming of the Bastille. Best not to teach why such insistences can lead to a bloody Terror followed by a Napoleon.

Standards also allow for the “flexible, dynamic, and highly-skilled workforce” unlikely to ever create that Change the World innovation that destroys the existing business of a political crony. Ooops! That was my editorializing in a snarky manner on the real purpose, just like in my book. Page 2 mentions standards as a means for countries now to “ensure social cohesion” and page 3 sees standards as a transformative tool for a “society that values equity and a ‘fair go’ for all.”

The latest book tied to the World Order Models Project, the 2008 The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy by Daniele Archibugi, wants to make “prevailing world public opinion” the determinant of what governments ought to be doing on behalf of their people, the governed, in the 21st Century. That aim, of course, puts quite a premium on manipulating that opinion from the Cradle to the Grave, as the current political slogan goes. Or Womb to Tomb in another variation. Archibugi does want a radical transformation where by “virtue of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent pacts, individuals have been endowed with positive rights that they can claim from their own states,” preferably at the local level via those ever compliant mayors, City Councils, and appointed regional commissions who just love federal grants.

Now you know why that Declaration just keeps coming up now in classroom activities. Archibugi wants this radical transformation in world politics to come about by persuasion, not force, which is of course all the more reason to utilize K-12 education. All the mentions of citizenship and civic competence we keep encountering, make much more sense when we recognize the plan to “demand a role for the citizens of the world” to insist that their “human rights” be provided by their governments. Perhaps as a “moral imperative”? All the mentions of dialogue and creating shared meaning make much more sense when we read again of an intention to bypass elected representatives in favor of:

“creating better and transparent contexts for decision-making. This is why new channels of representation must open up through which the various opinions may be expressed in a dialogical rather than antagonistic fashion. To be effective these channels demand a greater willingness on the part of individuals to participate in the management of global public matters. The making of a global commonwealth of citizens requires that individuals are prepared to act on the ground of key shared values. What principles of political action must the citizen of the world subscribe to?”

That would be the real reason for new pedagogies and forms of assessment to see if the desired principles of political action, needed workforce skills to be an obedient, compliant drone, and desired personality traits are in place. Adding to the quotes from the previous post, this is why New Pedagogies insists the new “goals for education and learning” include “skills that prepare all learners to be life-long creative, connected and collaborative problem solvers and to be healthy, happy individuals who contribute to the common good.”

Now we could make a good case that I contribute to the common good by reading books on all these plans of transformation and then tying them to what is coming to a school and classroom or your business place soon, but I believe Michael Fullan, Pearson, the OECD, and the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations want it to be their idea of appropriate values and the common good. Given all the references to ‘consensus,’ ‘shared purpose,’ and ‘collective will,’ there really does seem to be an organized attempt to erase any concept of individual sovereignty capable of standing supreme against the state. I guess that is what happens when you import your instructional practices from the Soviet Union, nurture the economic vision in a place that worshipped Mao, and look to rich universities full of wanna-be political and social planners for the vision of what “We the People” is supposed to mean in the 21st Century.

The 1995 book The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age, written by a former NPR President and head of the NBC News Division, laid out the planned transition to a participatory democracy using ICT technology. Upfront it asked “What will it take to turn the United States into a nation of qualified citizens who are engaged not as isolated individuals pursuing their own ends but as public-spirited members who are dedicated to the common good?” Why, K-12 education reform centered on the Whole Child and guiding perceptions and a curriculum focused on learning by doing and real world problems of course. Lawrence K. Grossman left NBC News to be a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and work on the democracy project that became that book. It’s where Jal Mehta of the New Pedagogies Project graduated from before moving on to Harvard’s Ed School to use its graduates as tools for the desired public policy changes. http://www.slidefinder.net/t/the_20chastened_20dream_20notes/thechasteneddream–withnotes/13854681

It’s also where the co-authors of the books in the Real Utopias Project, Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, are professors. The Kennedy School is also heavily involved now, by the way, with creating ties between the US and China. CELAP from our last post, in fact, is referred to as China’s answer to the Kennedy School. Real Utopia came out of an actual conference at the University of Wisconsin in January 2000, a good time to commence 21st Century Re-Do Plans I suppose. Now think for a second how a deep knowledge of history and human nature full of facts might get in the way of this purpose:

“The Real Utopias Project embraces this tension between dreams and practice. It is founded on the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions. Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful forces in history, and while it may be Pollyanna-ish to say ‘where there is a will there is a way,’ it is certainly true that without ‘will’ many ‘ways’ become impossible. Nurturing clear-sighted understandings of what it would take to create social institutions free of oppression is part of creating a political will for radical social changes to reduce oppression. A vital belief in a utopian destination may be necessary to motivate people to leave on the journey from the status quo in the first place, even though the actual destination may fall far short of the utopian ideal.”

It may also create students like what we are seeing in Denver, Colorado and what we saw during the heyday of the Occupy demonstrations who have no acquaintance with any factual knowledge from the past. Where will they be when OPM-Other People’s Money-inevitably runs out? Can they become self-sufficient as an adult or will change by force, rather than persuasion, feel like the justified response?

Is there any place in history where deposing sovereignty from the individual and placing it in a collective under political control, actually ever diminished oppression? Guaranteed to ignite would be the reality. No wonder perception and student daily experiences are being so manipulated.

Next time we will come back to the new view of politics in a Real Utopia and the Electronic Republic where we each get to be governed.

The problem with censorship, apart from the loss of personal liberty not to have governments intervene in what we think and how we must act, is two-fold if you are a wanna-be Steerer of Human Keels in the 21st Century. Some information always gets through and everyone knows that their flow of information is being regulated and manipulated. By using K-12 education globally in the 21st Century to “control learning experiences” or creating behavioral goals for what students are to “think and do” and then euphemistically labelling those aims as “standards” or “outcomes,” our Steersmen get to create what I am going to call Censorship Before the Fact. They intend to rule and they get to control what most of us will pay attention to, or ignore, in our daily lives. Plus we will not try to resist what we do not even recognize is there.

I want to go back to the 2014 book The Fourth Revolution that I first mentioned in the September 21 post (2 back).

“China is doing more than promoting a web of connections: It is deliberately promoting a model. When foreign officials come to China [Heads Up!! This means our mayors and state Governors and Chambers of Commerce on 'Trade Missions'], their tutors at places like CELAP [China Executive Leadership Academy at Pudong. It is elsewhere described as the 'cadre training school' that is "an organization bent on world domination"] now emphasize the virtues of the Chinese model–the way the state can focus on national champions or attract foreign investment into special economic zones or ensure the entrepreneurs join the Communist Party [substitute believe and act on the desired Big Ideas and it will fit the era here of new SATs and formative assessments] and thereby contribute to political stability as well as economic dynamism. They also compare China’s sleek government [no visits then to their troubling Ghost Cities] with America’s gridlock and India’s chaos. The government has seeded Confucius Institutes in universities across the world and is trying to use the Boao Forum for Asia as an ideological counterweight to Davos.”

We can just imagine how joyful the veterans of these trade junkets to China are to have had the US Congress enact that Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in July now requiring all states and localities to create state and local economic development plans tied to education.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priority-economic-citizenship-for-some-officially-sanctioned-status-as-prey-for-most-of-us/ I just want to point out that the Confucius Institutes mentioned are the same ones the College Board announced a formal alliance with this summer. Common Core Chief Architect David Coleman even made a very odd servile comment about “They are the Sun and we are the Moon.” The Boao Forum mentioned left Asia for the first time for a meeting and decided Seattle, Washington with Microsoft support and Bill Gates keynoting was a good place to meet. Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who presided over the taxpayer bailout of political favorites during the financial meltdown in 2008, also is deeply involved with Boao.

All of that is relevant to what is coming to the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, but those are connections no one is supposed to be making. Since I have the planned template and blueprints, I know where to look and what counts as connected that would be off most people’s radar screens. We know though from Michael Barber’s Oceans of Innovation report for Pearson covered here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/descending-to-a-connected-kleptocracy-via-the-digital-learning-and-climate-change-ruses/ that he, the US Department of Education, and Pearson all see China and a collectivist future as where K-12 education reforms are going globally. I am sure it is totally coincidental that the book was published by a Pearson entity and the authors write for a different Pearson entity–The Economist.

Pearson, Microsoft, Intel, and a new entity headquartered in Washington State which has gathered actors from all over the world–Collaborative Impact–have developed a partnership designed to promote a new consistent vision for K-12 education globally. This lays out their vision http://www.newpedagogies.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/New_Pedagogies_for_Deep%20Learning_Whitepaper.pdf You may have noticed that today’s post is less about the how of K-12 ‘reforms’ and more about turning a spotlight on the mostly invisible end game. Before We are Bound and while the Necessary Keels are still being laid in the young people who are the voters of tomorrow.

Point Number 1 is that the report acknowledges these are all experimental practices based on behavioral theories. Students are guinea pigs because it is the desired change that is important, not the people being changed by fiat. Secondly, the list of organizations involved includes the federally-created Digital Promise and thus the White House sponsored League of Innovative Schools. Please do not tell me there’s no connection to the Common Core. Yes, because it has already passed Go, collected $200, and gone straight to the Competency-Based Next Generation learning all these entities are pushing globally. Third and most crucially, the wholesale changes are explicitly about “What kind of learning work prepares [students] to be healthy, happy, productive members of our new societies?”

Participants in a Collective in other words. Ruled and Governed. Although Michael Barber is a key component of this partnership, the Lead Global Change Agent is Canadian Michael Fullan. In his 2001 book The New Meaning of Educational Change, Fullan cited personal communication to him from Barber, who was then heading up the equivalent large-scale reform in the UK for Tony Blair. Usefully for us, is the statement that for governments to be successful in the long term requires “creating frameworks for the accountability of public services including education.” Remember in our new “joined-up capitalism” we have private vendors but public regulation of what they do and how they do it. The mirage of free enterprise. Corporatist Enterprise as I have seen it called. Anyone surprised to learn that last week the Center for Reinventing Public Education and Fordham released those very accountability standards to go along with the Common Core?

Secondly, Barber acknowledged K-12 reforms are only a means to a transformative end. Getting there requires “placing education at the heart of a wider approach to social and economic renewal.” Elsewhere Fullan wrote that schools and adults needed to leave “Nostalgia behind” them and focus on the “knowledge and skills your children will need as they become citizens and workers in the future.” Notice that order and the assumption education is about fitting future life roles, not equipping anyone for independent. rational personal decision-making. One more time, Fullan made it clear that this new type of learning that is about changing, prescribing, and then monitoring students’ thoughts and behaviors and ‘reculturing’ the schools to require just that was to “enable the present generation to adapt to this radically new and demanding world.”

Adapt means change. Adapt means transform. Legally imposing this via K-12 education is the kind of Censorship Before the Fact that would be resisted if done visibly or to adults with Axemaker Minds.

I want to stop here so next time we can tie everything we know is coming to our schools and classrooms to the latest vision (2008) to come out of WOMP apart from that Richard Falk essay cited in the previous post. It’s called cosmopolitan democracy and it ties to everything in this post and the previous ones on e-Governance and Deliberative Democracy grounded in Dialogue. It also fits with the Sharing Economy so many of our mayors and cities are signing on to.

Since no one else is willing to admit that all these global K-12 education reforms are about “moving from the polis, founded on borders, to that of the cosmopolis, founded on sharing,” I will keep at it until Epiphanies Abound.

I guess we have also found yet another reason why traditional American History is becoming forbidden. Did I mention the former Head of the Gates Foundation, Tom VanderArk, started pushing the Gates-funded/Russian-created Big History last week as well?

Or as I like to call it, History Suitable for a Collectivist Future anywhere in the World.

Many of us have seen news reports in recent days on student walkouts in the Denver suburbs. The School Board wants to ensure that certain traditional areas are still emphasized in American history, while the students see the intervention as propaganda. The adults involved seem a bit shocked that what they see as facts is seen by high school students as an attempt to manipulate their belief systems. Why can’t the students properly understand who the People in the White Hats are in this controversy they seem to want to ask?

We can only repair the damage done if we appreciate what has happened in our schools and why. It relates to the e-Governance we started looking at in the last post as well as the creating the shared visions and collective purposes needed to effectively bind the individual to the decisions made by others. In his 1999 book The Double Helix: Technology and Democracy in the American Future, Edward Wenk laid out the new vision of politics our students are actually being prepared for. Government is to be “considered as a steering system and not simply a power broker.” This fits, attentive readers will remember, with the admitted use of conceptual understandings and the manipulated social construction of reality to create an invisible steerable keel in the students who are tomorrow’s citizens. Student-centered learning then instead of the subject-centered emphasis of old is necessary to build that keel. The ultimate consequences also fit with what Hayek warned us of in the previous post.

When the School Board tries to interject facts into the classroom, without appreciating that the keel is already there, it becomes easy for the adults closer to the classroom, who know what they have constructed over years, to steer the outrage. Facts=Propaganda if the Keel is already in place without parents, students, and most taxpayers knowing it’s there. Why is it there again? Ultimately, this generation of adolescents is being and has been primed to regard politics as a term used to “describe how elements of a diverse society use their power to bargain collectively, then strategies and tactics for their achievement, all within an agreed upon set of values and rules of engagement. This is American society in action.” That’s the vision of American society and politics the students are acting on, while the school board is still locked into a vision of traditional representative government.

“Consensus must be generated” so that governments can steer with a “high degree of harmony” towards a vision of Equity and social and economic justice for all. Many K-12 and college students have been thoroughly embedded in this vision for years. The Common Core is merely a means to make sure it is in place everywhere. Public or private. Suburbs, cities, or rural areas. To align the US with what is going on in other countries towards the same ends.

We adults are the ones who simply assumed that the education template had continued on much as it had previously been. Once social comity becomes the established goal of the future at all levels of governments, then “social functioning needs a consensus on goals and a mechanism for its generation and fulfillment.” We get that mechanism by K-12 and higher ed signing on, as well as the media, plus “whoever controls technology.” No wonder their related foundations are so involved.

ICT generates the visual images that serve as a “kaleidoscope” of what the future might be and are not bound by whatever has successfully existed before. Wenk wanted everyone to recognize that “Government is not mainly or the only machinery of governance. In American democracy, everyone should consider themselves part of government rather than holding it at arm’s length and figuratively holding the nose. Only by engagement through enlightened civic literacy, civic discourse and commitment can the diverse needs and desires of all be negotiated.” Hence the C3 Social Studies Framework and CCSSO prescribing desired Citizen Dispositions. As someone deeply steeped in history, this is a prescription for disaster, which is why accurate knowledge of the past is no longer being encouraged or much tolerated.

All the push surrounding Digital Learning and Laptops For All it should give us pause since Wenk recognized, and aimed for, what substituting those manufactured visuals and virtual reality would do to “critically alter the consciousness of the receptor.” That would be the student, your beloved child that you dropped off this morning and entrusted to a system intent on transformation. Well aware of the question that Wenk saw and intended to use: “What does information technology do TO us as well as FOR us.” In Wenk’s world government, industry, and people will all interact and then be bound by what the decision-makers decide. People are supposed to become satisfied with the ability to offer their opinions to “those who govern them.” If this seems like a scifi book or limited to one idealogue, it’s essentially the vision laid out by Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future in her 2013 book and speeches globally. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/weak-humanscomputersexpert-modelling-of-captured-data-is-this-your-approved-vision-of-the-21st/

It’s essentially the vision of the future and our new obligation to function as a collective that Richard Falk (of the Carnegie and Rockefeller-funded World Order Models Project) laid out recently here http://greattransition.org/publication/changing-the-political-climate-a-transitional-imperative . The new APUSH Framework and the La Pietra Conference we looked at in that trilogy of posts make much more sense when we are aware of a well-funded and determined effort across decades “about moving from the here of egoistic state-centrism to the there of humane geo-centrism.” Since Falk’s angry quotes at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing show he in no way wants a reality of hate to get in the way of his vision of the future, we can be sure that today’s tragic videos of sliced off heads will not change the vision either. It is up to us to recognize it.

Whether most of us are aware or not, Falk, the OECD, the UN entities, and public officials at all levels are pushing education and land use regulations designed to create the “citizen pilgrim” who “combines the identity of a participant in a community and the acknowledgment that the desired community does not presently exist, that its essential nature is to bond with a community that is in the midst of a birth process.” No wonder those Denver high school students believe accurate facts from America’s past constitute propaganda in the present. They are participating in a birthing process and many may hope to become midwives of it. No wonder we just keep encountering a required communitarian mindset lurking behind actual definitions of being Career Ready or having a Positive School Climate.

If everyone with political power globally is pushing a comparable vision of the collective future and that vision requires what Falk called “drastic shifts in political consciousness,” then preschool, K-12, and higher education will become dedicated to creating those very shifts. Those students are merely showing they are heeding the “call for an engaged citizenry responsive to the need and desire for a reconstituted future as well as a repaired present.” Why, it’s that Neanderthal School Board majority showing it has not yet yielded to the Transition clarion call that requires “infusing both political leadership and the electorate with the values and perceptions of the new realism.”

That again is the new realism that is actually not very realistic to those of us deeply grounded in knowledge of the past and conversant with what has ever created mass economic prosperity. No, we are apparently to be stuck with education designed to create over years “the engaged pilgrim devoted to the here and now of political action (as well as the pursuit of a visionary future), whether by way of exhibiting empathy and solidarity with the sufferings of those most vulnerable or by working toward innovative steps serving human and global interests.”

The good news in all this is that these students have been consciously subjected to behavioral engineering so that they will have Growth Mindsets that are malleable to change. They are only irreversible if parents, taxpayers, future employers, and the students themselves remain unaware of the deliberately constructed Worldview.

That they were subjected to fuzzy math and Whole Language precisely so that their perceptions could be manipulated.

The key to deconstructing the keel is to know it is there.

The key to defeating these open declarations of a planned transition to collectivism is knowing they exist.

Consider this post as joining my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon to be clarion calls towards defeating these collectivist aspirations. While there is still time.

Sounding the alarm truly is the beginning of the way back from the precipice.

I tend to come at the same issues from a different approach in part because I usually pick up on all the terms that have quietly acquired a non-dictionary meaning. The real definitions completely change what people are actually admitting they intend to do. When it comes to history now, at whatever age, approach all courses or activities, even for elementary students, with a recognition that “Personal Transformation on our Minds” is the motto crooned to the tune of “Georgia on My Mind”. You will never be far off from what the real goals are. Facts are really only important in this view of history if they can be used to shift how we see ourselves or others in the present.

Did you know that historian Thomas Bender (he actually seems to prefer the term Humanities professor) from the previous APUSH post and another NYU historian (now Harvard) Walter Johnson, also at La Pietra, have each been fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences since the Conference and before the formal relationship with the College Board began? History as a tool for altering human behavior in the present certainly puts the purposes of that otherwise mystifying Conceptual Framework in a new light, doesn’t it?

Did you know that back in 1934 the American Historical Association issued a Carnegie-financed report (remember they are now sponsoring Competency-Based Learning and so much more) called the “Report of the Commission of the Social Studies.” My thanks to the reader who read the previous post and directed my attention to this report on the american deception website. All the way back then, the AHA announced that “the American people are part of Western Civilization now merging into a world order.” Schools therefore needed to modify any coursework that would encourage “the traditional faith in economic individualism.” The US would be “embarking on vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people.”

Compliant is probably a more apt description for the new desired attitudes, but the soothing PR sales pitch in the report is that “education so conceived is concerned with the development of rich and many-sided personalities capable of co-operating.” Education that continued to focus on subject-matter content would simply “intensify the conflicts, contradictions, maladjustments, and perils of the transition.” Just thinking of us then is why we have been lied to about what has been really going on. The view that school could become primarily a matter of social adjustment and experiences while the real purposes hid behind continuing use of Academic Course Names has been on the record for a very long time.

When I said in the last post that the La Pietra Conference immediately made me think of the World Order Models Project, the original book that I reached for was the 1990 Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community. That book was essentially the post-Soviet Blueprint of how to proceed to ‘reform’ the West as if it actually did not ‘win’ anything at all. It grew out of a 1988 Moscow Workshop that launched the Global Civilization Project. I know. Another lost invite. The essential premises going forward were that the era of the nation-state was over and that the historic state form was insufficient as a “political community.” Instead, the locality should be the focus of the political community and politics should now be reconceived as “purposive social action directed at the conditions of social existence.”

If you redefine “democratic theory” going forward as “a theory of social movements rather than states” and you do not want to tell the masses in case they do not want to go along with such an oligarchy power play, you hide the shifts in education. You create a Common Core and use Close Reading to foster the desired perceptions of “which human identities are crucial, what forms of social action are necessary, what political communities have to be created.” You use the school to create classroom practices that involve “politics as an everyday experience” and never disclose why. You create an APUSH Framework that is missing most of the crucial facts, but is full of activities and concepts offering students a means for “working out new understandings of themselves and bringing those understandings into the world.”

That’s because it’s the Flyv Social Science definition of understanding as grounded in subjective experience and how the student learns to perceive it using the provided concepts and disciplinary Big Ideas. I will pull one more nerdy word out of Robin’s Magical Glossary of Pertinent Education Terms: phronesis. Every time you see the word ‘understand’ from now on having to do with what students are to ‘know’ it means grounded in experience and perception and not logic or facts. A phronetic, Arational understanding is what the social scientists and educators intent on fundamental transformations call it and we should appreciate it is not a fact-grounded, analytical sense of the word ‘understanding.’ Is APUSH making more sense now?

How about if I add that Bender’s 1978 book Community and Social Change in America explained the now close relationships between sociologists and historians to create a means to “illuminate the dynamics of a complex society.” To use historical data and sociological ideas to examine “the ways in which the roles, statuses, and identities held by individual Americans changed over time.” Now that’s a view of the purpose of history that would fit right in with a Global Civilization Project interested in bypassing the factual history that might preserve the legitimacy of the nation-state. Instead we quietly build up senses of entitlement and grievance in social movements.

Bender acknowledged that “ideology can create a national community held together by emotional bonds similar to those associated with the social experience of community” that we are discussing here. What Bender seems to want to focus on as history is the “network of social relations in which the individual is embedded” and what the “structure of social experience is.” He wants to look for and hopefully use history coursework to start a course back towards relationships and interactions grounded in the “qualities of mutuality and sentiment associated with community.”

If that sounds like Bender is interested in fostering the kind of communitarianism we just keep stumbling across in the actual Common Core implementation, I think that is exactly right. It would also explain all the foundation sponsorship of the La Pietra Conference. It is history as a social practice of students and teachers acting as a community to explore the past to better appreciate what is wrong with the present.

I have one more place I want to look to put APUSH into perspective while once again encountering the communitarian emphasis that never seems to be far away from what will be imposed on students in a K-12 school or classroom. The goal always seems to be to accustom each student to a more communitarian, interdependent approach in society and the economy. This book from 1992, Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities, is by Clifford W Cobb, a co-author of the very troubling for the common good, with a Foreword by famous communitarian prof Amitai Etzioni. It actually advocated for vouchers and charter schools and school choice generally as a more reliable vehicle for achieving the communitarian focus. That surprise would suggest I am not the only one who understands that accreditation is the monkey wrench that undermines genuine choice for parents.

So beware what remedies we advocate for without reading the footnotes and small print. My purpose for using that book is how well it fits with the template from both the 1934 Report and the methods for transformation of political community laid out in Contending Sovereignties. That 1992 book wanted schools that depend on “fostering concrete experiences of commitment to an immediate community. Those experiences can then be generalized into a devotion to the common good.” School becomes a means to “generate allegiance to core values,” which would of course put it in line with the global education template UNESCO and Pearson are quietly pushing.

Relevant to our igniter of social movements goal as the new actual purpose of history coursework (or Civics or English or STEM…) is the desire that Multiculturalism and Diversity be seen as goals that will allow the “continuing distinctiveness and autonomy of subcultures, particularly those based on ethnicity.” Well, let’s face it, not all ethnicities qualify. A few sentences further is the real point of cultural pluralism. Those “ethnic nuclei” that are to be respected are those that can constitute “enduring centers of social action.” Oh, that will go well with the new, post nation-state emphasis. The next page, revealing that our prying eyes were never meant to read that book and really grasp all the Diversity hype, “stresses the tactical value of limited separatism.”

Especially in our new world with its focus on the locality and everyday experience. Whatever the intentions of individual advocates today, please be aware that back in 1992 School Choice was being pushed by some as yet another means to get back to:

“the context of a community of personal affiliations that imposed moral expectations and sanctions on its members. That tradition can be revived by shifting from devotion to an abstract national community to reliance on particular, local communities. In other words, rather than expecting the state to resolve our disagreements with each other on moral issues, we should learn to rely on participatory communities to guide the behavior of individuals.”

I think that is what all education at every level globally is now geared to if, like me, you know where to look. We have been looking at an astonishing consistency of aims now from a huge variety of starting points and assumed affiliations.

Next I will walk us through how history is actually to be used before APUSH to get to the Global Civilization Project goals.

One of the ways to cope with these very real assertions of wholesale, non-consensual authoritarian change led by people who really do quote Mao Tse-tung for inspiration is to go back in time. To appreciate the same institutions, people, and funding sources were pushing comparable ideas decades ago. Explicitly using education to get there. It’s a holiday week in the US when we celebrate our Declaration of Independence so I thought it was a good time to revisit what was clearly mischief in Philadelphia in 1976. Called the Interdependence Assemblies, we don’t have to speculate about the intentions. Harlan Cleveland, then the head of the same Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, pushing the Racial Equity Theory of Change now, digital learning, and a new kind of mindset and view of knowledge, wrote the report.

Before I explain what The Third Try at World Order: American Self-Renewal in an Interdependent World laid out, let’s see what helpful piece of advice Harlan wanted to impart from the mass-murdering Mao. It was in the context of starting to “understand interdependence not by theorizing about it, but by getting on with it.” In a 21st century determined now to make education about activity instead of mental knowledge, it is always good to double check the actual sources of the vision. Here Mao is quoted as saying: “If you want to know the taste of the pear, you must change it by eating it yourself.”

I may never knowingly eat a pear again. Harlan followed that quote with his desire for “the emergence of a new American worldview” through “five parallel and simultaneous shifts in very basic assumptions and attitudes.” Isn’t it useful that 4 years later Jimmy Carter federalized US education with its own agency? So much easier to get this desired shift of perspectives via (1) the discovery of ecology, (2) the nature of power, (3) the double imperative of fairness, (4) doubts about the ‘Western Model’, and (5) a New Style of Leadership. The last one proclaimed by the way that a “collegial, consultative mode of behavior” would now be mandatory.

In the book I explain that Harlan Cleveland announced that in 1986 he began working to transition the US and the USSR to a successor economic system to both capitalism or communism. Details are in the book using Harlan’s own words and why it matters so much. In Boyte’s book described in that post above he mentioned working with Harlan at that same time while both were in Minnesota. Almost all these books I am reading with this new governance vision cite Harry Boyte and Benjamin Barber and his Strong Democracy Civil Society vision.

That’s why it matters that Benjamin Barber now wants mayors and cities to be the centers of political power in 21st century America. It’s the place to force collectivism and economic justice invisibly. I am going to have more to say on that in the future, but there are in fact plenty of links between what is engulfing us today whether enough people recognize the commonalities or not, and what Harlan Cleveland, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, and the Convocation of UN Leaders he wrote that report for wanted back in 1976.

Harlan saw the Declaration of Interdependence adopted in Philadelphia that most of us have never heard of as the “instrument” of a new planned adventure in “world order politics” that would be based on the primacy of human needs. It would supposedly become a means of “American self-renewal–that is, to get our tail ship back on a course that has history with it, not against it.” I think this vision was actually designed to hobble America, suck away its exceptionalism, destroy its prosperity, and to do much of this destructive work through education. I think outcomes-based education as I explain in the book was to fulfill this toxic vision of altering perspectives and attitudes and values in fundamental ways, and that the actual Common Core implementation is the end game of this same vision.

When you are watching fireworks this week, listening to a rousing Sousa march, chanting “USA. USA” to the US soccer team in World Cup action, or even putting on that tacky Red, White, and Blue swimsuit you only wear once a year, remember there is nothing accidental about the shifts of the last 40 years. The attacks have been cultural and stealthy and at the level of the human mind and personality, but they most definitely are not theoretical or fanciful or the product of an overactive imagination. Harlan pitched into his Mao quote by using the Webster’s dictionary definition of an attitude as a “state of readiness to act…that may be activated by an appropriate stimulus into significant or meaningful behavior.”

Guess who intended to provide the appropriate stimulus? Still do. Harlan went on to say that “we might look for clues to future American behavior in attitudes that are already in transition.” Yes, indeed and to all those who agonize over what is being sought via education to create economic, social, and political change, just watch Americans celebrate on Friday. The way back is to acknowledge what is dear and that it has been under assault. Deliberate attacks through our institutions cannot survive well yet except in the shadows.

That’s why it’s up to each of us to drag these intentions into the sunlight of public scrutiny. If your child or grandchild or employee never learned why America is exceptional and has been the indispensable player in the world, teach them. If the community organizers insist on a different view of civics education and want to enshrine it into new federally mandated workforce training they provide, tell every politician you see this week at a parade or barbeque that it’s not OK. To actually read that 812 page Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

The third try at world order was to be based on the same “growing awareness of the interdependence of peoples, problems, and policies” that is the focus today. If only Americans would adopt “changes in attitudes and institutions at home” and fashion “new cooperative attitudes” abroad, the world could supposedly become a “community.”

Wasn’t true in 1976 during the height of the Cold war when this was a highly dangerous prescription. It’s not true now when this same philosophy appears to be the new basis for the US foreign policy in a very dangerous world. We keep encountering a determination to use education to guide perception about the way the world and the future might be, instead of a factual recognition of reality.

Let this post be a clarion call to enjoy loved ones and friends this week, but do it while recognizing that the way of life we are celebrating and taking for granted has been under continuous assault. Those attacks are scheduled to reach a fever pitch in the next few years with the intention that no one would appreciate the linkages in time.

That isn’t going to happen anymore. Let’s celebrate that epiphany and start our way back.

Together. Collectivism is not always bad as long as it recognizes that renewal can only come from the individual. It can never simply be on his or her behalf.

Unconstitutional earthquakes no one would willingly submit to can be hard to prove. Words like governance or mandatory collective decision-making or public goods get thrown about where the implication of a seismic shift is there, but that is rarely good enough to lay out convincingly on a blog that we are at great, demonstrable risk. If all of the actual Common Core implementation, and the digital learning essential component that runs in tandem with it, are actually designed to “give birth to the new systems and structures through which ordinary people are taking responsibility for their own and their community’s futures,” we have every right to have that included in the upfront public explanation of what is really going on. Especially in a world where Human Rights are now quietly touted as involving Economic Justice based on Racial Equity Outcomes.

That makes who has authority to seize, plan, and redirect people and property of vital importance going forward. As we discussed in the last post, crucial to these shifts is a new theory being pushed by the White House and charitable foundations called Deliberative Democracy. Like Sherlock Holmes fixating on a dog that did not bark, the lawyer and historian in me could just smell the fundamental shift in quotes like this one from the 2005 Deliberate Democracy Handbook (my bolding):

“By stipulating fair procedures of public reasoning that are, in principle, open to everyone, the outcomes of a deliberative procedure will be seen as legitimate because they are the result of a process that is inclusive, voluntary, reasoned, and equal…Deliberative democracy takes seriously the idea that the exercise of collective political authority must be capable of being justified to all those who will be bound by it. To fail to accept this idea is to fail to take the freedom and equality of persons equally.”

Do tell. So like Fulton County’s Conversion School District Charter, the idea is to use contractual language or laws or regulations to invisibly and nonconsensually bind anyone who might complain or resist once they become aware of this seismic shift in where sovereignty over the citizen and student lies in the 21st century. This turns out to be a global pursuit, but the US has a federal Constitution intended to prevent just this sort of public sector power grab. That would explain the desire to bring this in invisibly via education and regional governance compacts and mission statements and vision reports about metro areas.

In case anyone believes that I have an overactive imagination or am reading intentions into perfectly innocent and well-intentioned statements cooperation, here are three links to get your attention that this is a real problem that we were never to recognize in time. The first is The Deliberate Democracy in the Classroom Toolkit created to be compliant with the Common Core classroom and a new vision for what citizenship involves in 21st century America, including new kinds of dispositions. http://cdd.stanford.edu/toolkit/cdd-complete-toolkit.pdf The Toolkit has an interesting view of the relevant facts and obligations and once again PBS has prepared a curriculum called By the People, much as it did for that related transformational curriculum for the Common Core involving Facing History and Ourselves we covered in our recent Human Rights Trilogy.

Now just think about how handy that Toolkit and mandates about a Discourse Classroom involving considering respectfully the perspectives of all others as equally valid and schools Fostering Communities of Learners who come to agreement on a shared understanding will be to this goal:

“[learning democracy] centers share a common goal of lifting the voices and mobilizing the creative energies of diverse community members to improve the quality of life across all sectors and in all its dimensions.”

To those of you who have read the book John Dewey’s concept of ‘participatory democracy’ as the means to force economic justice is indeed alive and well and so is his favorite tool of forcing the seismic shift nonconsensually through the schools. The second point also aligns with the book’s disclosures and what the 1966 Yearbook described as intended for metro regions and urban areas and then what Turchenko described in 1976 in that Soviet report that was so quickly translated into English. Bruce Katz, who we first met here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/protected-producers-vs-paying-consumerstaxpayerswho-will-prevail-on-education-and-the-economy/ wrote a 2013 book called The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy.

The book was published under the “auspices of the Brookings-Rockefeller Project on State and Metropolitan Innovation.” That matters because the Rockefeller charities are clearly pushing the Deliberative Democracy concept hard according to searches I did over the weekend. That’s actually what turned up the Toolkit since By the People was created with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as it repeatedly states. Someone is pleased with their efforts and is insistent on saying so.

I am going to resist the temptation to explain to Bruce Katz that economies cannot be built based on federal grants to create manufacturing institutes around clean energy or voters in LA and Denver voting massive sales tax increases around transit projects. Those are transfers involving bureaucrats spending OPM-Other People’s Money. Zero sum is the best case scenario.

Economic illiteracy, like the results of mind arson to get citizens compliant with Deliberate Democracy, matters though to the consequences of public spending. It is very easy to get lots of debt and unmeetable expectations for the future in the public sector-led reimaginings of the way the world should work going forward. That’s why it is so dangerous for Katz to be calling for “another historic shift in federalism.” He wants the “dual sovereigns” of the states and the federal government to be forced to share power with “their subjects, cities and metropolitan areas.”

Sometimes only a $100 word will do. That Usurpation by Fiat of sovereignty away from the individual in the US system, and then insisting sovereignty that is not supposed to exist in fact now be shared with nebulous regional authorities coordinating around Vision Statements, is absolutely Stealth Authoritarianism. It is the politically connected coercing everyone else to go along. How’s this for an open declaration of radical reshaping? This economic vision will amount to waste, but the hoped-for shift to governance of the individual is intended to survive apparently.

“We are trying to advance a theory of federalism that asks how federal and state sovereigns, and other partners and networks in governance, should interact to coproduce the economy. The metropolitan revolution is, at its core, an economic revolution…”

I’ll say. The next page says that “private and public sectors will coproduce the public good.” That’s highly doubtful, but it sure makes a good rationale for an unconstitutional usurpation of authority over people and property. I guess we can now think of what we know, own, or can do as merely in our temporary custody. Subject to seizure by the public sector and its cronies in an economic power grab that’s not that different from the serf forced to work land because it benefits the noble landholder.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_fy2009/m09-12.pdf is the actual memo. Hard to believe that the Administration that has supposedly lost incriminating IRS e-mails after they were subpoenaed actually meant to become Transparent, but that National Center for Dialogue & Deliberation makes it quite clear that this vision of public participation and collaboration is very crucial to that openly declared intention of fundamental transformation.

The better to bind us by and invisibly shift sovereignty going forward apparently. This is a good breaking point before I launch into explaining how the mindset perfectly suited for Deliberative Democracy per that Handbook is also the precise Mindset and malleable Worldview that the Common Core and digital learning state that they want to create.

Plus I do not think it’s coincidental that the name of the new Aspen Center report on digital learning and the new kind of mindset needed–”Learner at the Center of a Networked World” uses one of Bruce Katz’s favorite expressions for his desired metro-led economy of the 21st century–the ‘networked world’.

We are so far beyond having to infer any more from a Dog that Did Not Bark in our investigations of what is really going on in education.

And what is intended for most of us. Stealth Usurpation. What a phrase.

In my ongoing pursuit to track precisely what future is being planned for us, why education is being so radically altered in deceitful ways without consent, and why so many people assume people now exist to be governed and dictated to through political power I went back to that Humane Governance book I mentioned in the last post. Sure enough, in order to offer comprehensive rights “to those most vulnerable” as well as “all peoples on earth” Falk called for “a proper ordering of political life at all levels of social interactions” including the home and personal relationships. We may grasp that such officially sanctioned meddling is likely to turn the world into those who seize, those whose time or property are seized, and distributees, but it really is the new theory of rightful political and economic power being pushed in the 21st century.

No wonder I kept hearing references to governance that assumed that political power can now dictate individual choices. If the aim is indeed the “normative consciousness of society” including “the sense of life’s purpose” it makes perfect sense that education, Preschool, K-12, and higher ed, is so determined to make values, attitudes, and beliefs and the delegitimization of the very concept of the individual its focus. What I was not prepared for when I tackled the 2006 book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule is Giving Way to Shared Governance…and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same by Matt Leighninger was discovering that governance of all of us was deemed necessary to achieve Racial Equity Outcomes. Or that there was a White House conference in August 2009 that Leighninger was part of to officially kick start this vision of democracy and governance. http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/ostp/opengov/sond2%20final%20report.pdf

Another lost invite. Someone who was not only invited but was a co-sponsor of the conference was Everyday Democracy, which is the new name for what used to be called the Study Circles Resource Center. Along with the Southern Poverty Law Center we keep encountering as it protects the Common Core, SCRC created this Upper Grades Handbook called “Reaching Across Boundaries: Talk to Create Change” http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mixitup.pdf in an earlier commitment to required dialogues to supposedly create healthy school communities and a Positive School Climate where “every student can grow socially and academically.” Note that order of priority. That handbook remains in print because this is the kind of transformative school program where all children can be deemed to succeed and ‘grow.’ Plus there is that useful change to the acceptable norms of society beliefs and values.

OK you say, that’s one example but do I really have to make governance about race? The problem is that when I followed the footnotes in Leighninger’s book I discovered unbelievably alarming and sanctioned official initiatives like this 2002 Training for Racial Equity and Inclusion: A Guide to Selected Programshttp://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/rcc/training.pdf It starts with a quote from a Manning Marable that:

“When we talk about race, we don’t mean a biological or genetic category, but, rather, a way of interpreting differences between people which creates or reinforces inequalities between them. In other words, ‘race’ is an unequal relationship between social groups, represented by the privileged access to power and resources over another.”

So the existence of inequality among groups for whatever reason becomes the excuse to Govern everyone and meddle constantly in what people believe, value, have, or what they can do. To seize economic and political power and dictate approved social interactions. To define “modern racism as unconsciously held beliefs and feelings that people of color are making illegitimate demands for changes in the status quo.” To be deemed racist if you are not willing to fund the revolution and do it now. Won’t the omnipresent focus now on social and emotional learning come in handy with such programs prescribing a “psycho-social approach to changing racism emphasizes the importance of individual awareness and emotional literacy–or the ability to read one’s own emotions and those of other’s–in the process of understanding and changing oppression.”

Once again this focus in K-12 is equitable, since everyone has emotions, and transformative for “creating a more equitable and just future.” Just what Falk envisioned as Humane Governance and why Gorbachev joined in in 1986. Race becomes the way to transform behaviors in the West and consciousness all at the same time plus seize economic power. Truly who needs a Cold War when there’s education.

RETOC is short for Racial Equity Theory of Change and it is “the desired alternative to white privilege. Racial equity paints a radically different social outcomes ‘picture’ in which race is not consistently and predictably associated with disadvantage. It envisions a fairer America in which race is not associated with merit and social opportunities. With racial equity, we would not have social strata, prisons, schools, boardrooms and communities that are distinguished by their skewed racial profiles.

A racial equity vision takes for granted that the nation possesses sufficient resources to offer everyone an equal chance to succeed.” http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/aspeninst1.pdf Since people have resources, not the nation itself unless we are going to redistribute national parks, racial equity is all about seizing what is desired for redistribution as well as Mind Arson to keep things equitably tied to those transformatively useful emotions. Since RETOC intends to dismantle Structural Racism, it becomes an excuse to meddle everywhere, once again necessitating the concept of Governance. After all, how else can governments and special interest groups alter:

“the many systemic factors that work to produce and maintain racial inequities in America today. [No attempt is being made of course to change factors like unwed teenaged mothers or force urban schools to finally teach reading properly] These are aspects of our history and culture that allow the privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and the disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to remain deeply embedded within the political economy. Public policies, institutional practices and cultural representations contribute to structural racism by reproducing outcomes that are racially inequitable.”

And if all this meddling and required restructuring of social interactions and relationships extinguishes much of those resources targeted so everyone can succeed, what then? What if the REO-desired Racial Equity Outcome–is not just something that can be imposed or dictated? What will be the effect of targeting the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ of Local power to force these REOs? Governance becomes necessary so that “decision making bodies at the state, local, or regional levels” can dictate the desired changes, whatever the actual costs.

Finally, the Aspen Institute, which again is so determined to push digital learning that replaces mental knowledge with the use of a visual tool as the key component of the Common Core implementation, published this document in September 2009. Highly relevant then to what is also going on in education, the AI Roundtable on Community Change created this “Constructing a Racial Equity Theory of Change: A Practical Guide for Designing Strategies to Close Chronic Racial Outcome Gaps.” http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/images/Roundtable%20on%20Community%20Change%20RETOC.pdf That report opens with the declaration in bold print that “As we begin the 21st century, the embeddedness of racism in our institutions and culture continue to exert great influence on how social benefits and burdens are distributed.”

Distributed by whom we should legitimately ask. The fallacy that these benefits and burdens are being inequitably ‘distributed’ is being used to seize power to be able to distribute. To plan societies. To force action by public officials against anyone or anything deemed in the way of an REO. That report helpfully reminds “planners to take the likelihood of sociopolitical resistance and retrenchment into account whenever they design and implement racial equity action strategies.”

So far that outcry has not been a problem because these REOs are being pursued but not under the actual Theory of Change. Not under the name Racial Equity Outcomes. The sought ‘backward mapping’ is going on in the schools, but it goes by names like Growth or Positive School Climate or Equitable Engagement of All Students. The function of transformative change and the seizure of powers of governance without admitting it’s about REO and eliminating Structural Racism.

In writing of the related Humane Governance, Professor Falk acknowledged that this is all about pursuing a “democratizing agenda of bringing law and popular participation to bear upon policies that control the exercise of economic and political power.” Race is just the excuse for seizing that power for the public sector and its allies. It offers emotions of grievance that have been carefully cultivated and boots on the ground voting for transformative change via seizure.

And no one pushing Humane Governance or Racial Equity seems to be grasping that if true wealth is the mind and what it is capable of, these policies may well be creating piles of dust.

No one can seize what has ceased to exist. Creating a sense of righteous revenge in some groups and an obligation to allow predation in others only creates human betterment in a fantasy world. But we can only confront the likely reality if we recognize what is now being pushed in the name of Equity and Democracy.